President Donald Trump caused outrage on August 27, 2026, by signing an executive order renaming Lake Ontario as Lake America. His move came against the backdrop of the breakdown of trade talks with Canada. While Trump may have felt his action would sleight Canada, historians pointed out that the name Lake Ontario actually predates Canada’s self-governance and the formation of the Ontario province by more than a century.
The name Lake Ontario actually predates Canada’s self-governance and the formation of the Ontario province by more than a century.
This is not the first time Trump has renamed bodies of water to conform with his desire to place America first. On Inauguration Day, he signed an executive order entitled “Restoring Names that Honor American Greatness,” recasting the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. The name Gulf of Mexico, for example, dates to the mid-sixteenth century and commemorates the Nahuatl-speaking Mexica people. Just as the Ontario province took is name from the lake, the country Mexico took its name from the Gulf and not vice versa.
Trump’s defenders questioned the outrage, given that President Joe Biden had changed hundreds of place names and spent millions of dollars renaming U.S. military bases. Still, pundits pilloried Trump’s moves, at home and abroad, both because of Trump’s motives and the fact that the terms Trump targeted were bodies of water shared between countries. No country has recognized the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico or Lake Ontario.
Al Jazeera—the Qatari-funded news network generally antagonistic to the United States—questioned whether Trump really could change the names. “Trump is using cartography as a weapon of mass distraction to call attention away from his falling approval ratings and the rising cost of living caused by his policies,” Reuben Rose-Redwood, professor at the Department of Geography at the University of Victoria, told the network. Al Jazeera’s article is ironic, though, since Qatar is among the Arab countries that have insisted on calling the Persian Gulf by the recent construction, the “Arabian Gulf.” Qatar’s foreign ministry, for example, describes the country this way: “The State of Qatar is a peninsula located on the western coast of the Arabian Gulf, approximately 100 km wide and 200 km long.”
The true name of the body of water is the Persian Gulf. Arabs dating back more than 1,000 years referred to the Gulf as “Khalij al-Fars” (Persian Gulf) in maps and geography books. So did Europeans and Americans in more modern times. While Qatar uses the revisionist name—as does Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and European countries who purchase oil from Arab partners—older maps in the Qatari collection show the true name.
The term Arabian Gulf is new. At the height of the pan-Arabist movement, Arab states promoted the name change, to tie the Gulf to the Arab world. While Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser popularized Arab nationalism, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein took it in a lethal new direction when he used Arab unity as his excuse to invade Iran.
At the height of the pan-Arabist movement, Arab states promoted the name change, to tie the Gulf to the Arab world.
Initially, the U.S. government officially maintained its true name but, after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, U.S. Central Command and the State Department embraced the Arabian Gulf moniker. It was a cynical move: Iran had moved from ally to adversary, and so U.S. diplomats and military officials used the Arabian Gulf, however false, to pander to Arab capitals.
Ironically, while Canadians mock Trump for changing Lake Ontario to Lake America, they ignore that their own government has done the same thing by going along with the renaming of the Persian Gulf to Arabian Gulf.
The “Lake America” moniker is silly and ahistorical but so, too, is the “Arabian Gulf.” Iran might be an adversary but that does not justify the renaming the Persian Gulf. Two wrongs do not make a right. Perhaps those criticizing Trump’s bluster and renaming spree should be self-aware enough to realize they have waged a similar assault on history for reasons just as spurious.
